Cultural Change

Here's an interesting research paper that got me thinking about how culture changes, especially in relation to 7 Cups: Cultural Fragmentation or Acquired Dispositions? A New Approach to Accounting for Patterns of Cultural Change (open access)

One idea is that perhaps culture might change mainly because people are influenced by current events. Without this organizing influence, people's ideas about culture are disorganized—this is cultural fragmentation. The culture of the present day changes mainly in response to present-day influences.

Alternatively, perhaps culture might change mainly because people are influenced by events early in their lives. They acquire dispositions that last a lifetime. Present-day culture appears to change when the proportion of people who were influenced by certain historical events reaches a kind of tipping point, but their dispositions were formed long ago.

Which is it?

The authors of this paper did a lot of research and statistical analysis, and concluded that the acquired disposition model is the more important one (in the US in the last 40 years). Events early in people's lives influence the culture more than current events.

Put another way, if we want to make our best guess...about what a person thinks or what kinds of practices he or she engages in, we would be better off knowing what year the person was born than what year we are observing them.

At 7 Cups

Applying this to 7 Cups is highly speculative, of course. It could imply that people join 7 Cups having already acquired dispositions from their early lives that we cannot hope to change. Or it could imply that people joining 7 Cups acquire dispositions from their early experiences here at 7 Cups.

In turn, these possibilities have implications if we want to change some aspect of our culture—maybe, for example, we don't want so many listeners who give advice, or so many bullies in the chatrooms. The way to do it is either to select leaders in the community who already have the dispositions we want, or to influence new members' and listeners' dispositions immediately they join. This research suggests that trying to change people's cultural dispositions after they have been formed doesn't work.

Either way, we then simply wait for any existing advice-givers and bullies to burn out and leave, and we replace them with new leaders in the community who have the acquired dispositions we want. Eventually the culture will reach a tipping point and it will seem like advice and bullying have suddenly disappeared.

2019

As we look forward to 2019 our thoughts turn to the ways in which, over the coming year, we can make our community even better than it is now. @Jill7cups suggested this wishlist recently:

• thriving conversations in rooms and in forums,
• happy teams that love what they do, and
• product features that will make all this easier.

And @jennysunrise8 (in the same thread) suggested more awareness of power and accountability.

After deciding what we want to improve, the next thing is to decide how it can be done. Perhaps this kind of research into how culture works can help us to be smarter and more effective when it comes to the "how".